


Don't You Come Back

by genocideandgenesis



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Backstory, F/M, Gen, Road Trips, Spoilers - A Tale of Two Stans, extremely subtle allusions to drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-14 00:50:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4543827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genocideandgenesis/pseuds/genocideandgenesis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stan likes to call his life a road trip, but living on his own has its downsides, too. Snapshots of Stan’s travels in the 1970s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't You Come Back

The air was salty, humid, and stiff. Stan was curled in the backseat of his car, his cheek pressed against the old shirt he'd balled into a makeshift pillow. He was parked just outside the town border, in an abandoned parking lot; until tonight, he had never been here, and he hoped his father never had, either.

Stan shifted against the seat, squeezing his eyes shut. He’d slept back here before, but always on long trips with his dad and Ford to pick up new merchandise for Pines Pawns.

He wasn’t parked far from the ocean, and he could hear the waves.

Stan rubbed at his eyes with one weary fist.

“Get ahold of yourself, Stanley,” he said, rolling onto his back to stare up at the ceiling. “Livin’ on your own’s gonna be great.”

Living on his own was giving him a neck cramp.

As soon as the sun came up, he’d find a way to make this work, but he wasn’t going back.

—

When Stan Pines was banned from the state of New Jersey, Stanley fled town with the first of many fake IDs, a backseat full of stained Sham Totals, and a few broken pitchforks.

“Ha, ha, that was a close one,” he crowed, wind whipping through the car through the open windows.  

He checked his rear view mirror. No mob, no cops: he’d lost ’em.

“I’m gonna have to get rid of that stuff, aren’t I,” Stan remarked to the passing highway. In the backseat, the Sham Totals were oozing dye on the upholstery.

He glanced back at the “chamois of the future” and shrugged. Maybe it’d come in handy sometime.

“See you never, New Jersey!” he cackled as he sped over the state border and entered Pennsylvania.

—

It took him two nights to realize that it didn’t smell like ocean anymore.

He was sitting on the trunk of the car, eating a hamburger. The flavor wasn’t good; the lettuce was flat, and there wasn’t enough ketchup. It reeked of onions. No matter; he’d had the money to buy it.

But when he’d taken one last swig of soda to get rid of the onion flavor, and stretched out along the trunk of the car, hands tucked behind his head to watch the sky fade to night, he realized that it smelled like imminent autumn. It didn’t smell like fall at the beach.

“Whatever, who needs the ocean anyway,” Stan said. He heaved himself off the back of the car, crumpling his burger bag in one fist. He looked around, but there was nowhere to throw it away. He tossed it in the backseat, climbed in behind the wheel, and put up the windows before driving off.

—

Rain pattered against the windows of what Stan had taken to calling the “Stanmobile.” He couldn’t get the heat to work, so he’d moved the pitchforks to the trunk and was huddling in the backseat, where the windows didn’t leak.

His arms itched from where he’d applied “The Rip Off” for his latest commercial.

“Good one, Steve Pinington,” he muttered. “You really sold it this time.”

—

Stan startled awake at the knock on his window. There was light shining his eyes, blinding in the dark of night.

“Whoever you are, I don’t have the money!” he shouted, raising his hands to block out the light.

“Sir, put down your window, please,” commanded a deep voice outside the car.

Stan was already disregarding the order, scrambling over takeout boxes to crawl into the front seat. The blasted light was following him. “Come on, come on, where are my keys,” he muttered, searching his pockets, under the driver’s seat, the ignition–

“Sir!” There were three sharp raps against his window. “It’s the police. Put down your window.”

They’d found him, and he couldn’t find his keys. Steeling himself for the worst, Stan turned the hand crank and put down the window, squinting into the eyes of the two officers standing beside the Stanmobile.

“Uh, what is it, Officer? Officers, plural? I, uh, I’m not the guy you’re looking for, I swear, it was an accident.”

“We were just stoppin’ on account of you parked on the side of the road,” said one cop. “That’s illegal in this county. We were gonna ask you to move along.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, definitely. I was just, uh, gettin’ some shut-eye.”

“We’ve noticed you parked there the last three nights, sir. We’re gonna have to ask you to head home, now.”

“Sure, right, I’m on it.” As soon as he could start the car, he’d be gone.

“Listen, are you havin’, er, marriage problems?” asked one cop, sounding almost sympathetic. “Taking a few days away from home?”

“Somethin’ like that,” Stan said gruffly.

“Right, well, keep out of these parts, and hey, listen,” said the cop, leaning down to the window to whisper conspiratorially in Stanley’s ear, “maybe head ’round home again sometime. Sometimes stoppin’ by again makes all the difference.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Stan said, not meeting the officer’s eyes.

“You have yourself a good night, son,” said the other cop.

He waited until they were gone and tried to put up the window, but it stuck. He leaned back, head against the headrest, and let out a sigh.

“Marriage problems,” he scoffed as he rooted around under the passenger’s side seat for a map.

Even after he’d decided to hit Kentucky next, it took him a good ten minutes to find his key from where it had fallen to the floor in the back of the Stanmobile.

—

Carla leaned close to him rather than raising her voice to be heard over the music at the Juke Joint. Her hands were warm against his, her smile wide and open. “Do you live around here?”

He almost tripped then and there, and if his grip on her hands tightened to compensate for his sudden stiff legs, her smile didn’t falter to show it.

Come on, Stan, _think_ , she’s smiling at you, no, no, don’t think about it–

Got it.

“Oh, no way,” he said, breaking out his biggest, most self-assured grin. “I’m road-trippin’, baby. All over the country. No state untouched!”

No state revisited, either, but he didn’t have to say that.

He swung her in close, then spun her out in a tight turn, finishing up the song with a flashy, show-stopping dip: Carla’s leg dramatically out in the air, his arms supporting her back.

They returned to their booth, breathing hard. Stan looped his arm around Carla’s waist and slid in beside her, flagging down one of the waiters. “Milkshake for two, please.”

—

Carla didn’t care about the vacuum handles sticking out of the trunk, or that there were old candy wrappers littering the passenger’s side floor. She sat cross-legged to accommodate for them, her hand stretched across the front seat to hold Stan’s.

He’d shoved everything in the backseat into the trunk; never mind that he’d have to clean it out for his next round of sales, because right now he had Carla McCorkle next to him in the Stanmobile, headed for the scenic outlook he’d been using as a place to sleep for the last week while he’d frequented the Juke Joint, “accidentally” running into Carla whenever she showed up to dance.

Watching the sunset turned into Carla initiating an intense and challenging tickle fight, which culminated in the two of them squashed into the backseat, kissing.

“The road trip life is the best life,” Stan declared, breaking away to flash Carla a grin: a genuine one, wider than his calculating Sales Grin.

Carla punched his arm. “I’ve got an idea for your next destination,” she said, climbing back to the front seat.

That night, Stan slept on a bed for the first time in years.

—

“Is it because he has a van and I don’t?” Stan demanded, face-to-face with Carla.

“It has nothing to do with that,” she said, shrugging. “Things don’t always work out. People leave. Look, it was fun, but my life is taking a new direction. Something more transcendental. For what it was worth, though, these weeks have been incredible.”

“Not that incredible, though, huh,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

“Take care of yourself, Stan,” she said, not answering the question.

She left with Thistle Downe. Damn that stringed-instrument hippie.

Stan sat in the Juke Joint parking lot for almost twenty minutes, staring into the darkness, cheery 50s music floating into the night, the smell of cigarette smoke and marijuana stale in the interior of the Stanmobile.

—

“How long will you need this room?”

“Just a few nights.” Stan coughed into his elbow. It had been two days since he’d slept; he’d had a run-in with the cops south of the San Diego border, and he needed to crash for a week. He didn’t want to admit it, but he’d been sick, and his reaction times weren’t what they’d been five years ago.

He paid in cash and didn’t leave his real name. Rico was out for money again. It was all a big misunderstanding, but Rico didn’t see it that way.

When he unlocked his room and opened the door, the sudden influx of light scared away a few mice.

“Gross,” Stan said.

He threw his duffel bag on the desk and flopped down against the comforter. A spring dug into his back.

“Home sweet home,” he said, sprawled out on the bed, staring up at the cracks on the ceiling. He fished in his coat pocket. There was one lone cigarette rattling around in the box.

He breathed smoke into the dingy light of his motel room. He coughed.

Having a bed this big to himself was weird: too many ways to stretch out. He could spread his arms out completely and he still didn’t take up the whole bed. It took him a long time to get to sleep.

—

Some of the broken Stan-Vacs made their way from the backseat into his motel room. Then came the Stanco boxes, some of his clothing, and the few surviving Sham Totals. New Mexico wasn’t the worst place to live.

The door rattled.

“There’s a knocker for a reason!” Stan shouted, even as he dove for his baseball bat.

“We know you’re in there!” shouted a man with a thin, reedy voice.

“Yeah, genius, I just told you to knock on the damn door!”

The door burst open to reveal Rico’s goons, all of them with pistols leveled at Stan’s face.

“Whoa, whoa, no need for violence!” He gripped the bat, edging backward. “Look, I’ve got your cash, okay? Or–or I will. Just gimme time!”

“That’s what you said last time, Alcatraz!” said the shortest goon, the one with the largest gun.

“Y-yeah, but I mean it this time, I swear, I’m just going to pick it up now! I’ve gotta meet a guy–”

His hands were shaking, but he held the bat steady.

“You can have another day, Alcatraz, but just one more day. And I’m telling Rico about this.”

They retreated, guns still leveled at him.

The door closed.

Stan sank down onto the bed. If he packed now, he could–he could head out of town.

The states he’d crossed out had been as part of a big fat joke, but now they just stood for places he couldn’t ever see again.

“Time to cross New Mexico off the map, 8-Ball,” he said. His voice was hoarse, but there was nobody there to hear when it cracked.

—

That evening, he was sitting on the bed, barefoot, when someone knocked four times on the door.

“Just give me a few more days, Rico!” he shouted, already reaching behind the headboard for his bat. “I’ll pay your goons back, I swear!”

A piece of paper fluttered through the mail slot.

Suspicious, Stan stood and peered out the peephole. It wasn’t Rico, unless Rico had turned into a mailman.

He crouched down to the ground to pick up the postcard from where it had fallen to the floor.

Gravity Falls, huh.

—

He dumped the last of the Stanco boxes on the side of the road at the Arizona border.

“Sure has been a while since _this_ state’s seen Stanco Enterprises!” he crowed, kicking the back door shut with one foot. “Wanna purchase a Stan-Vac? They suck! More than YOU, Arizona!”

He left the window down and stuck one hand one the window to grasp at the highway wind. 

“Just passing through!” he howled into the southwestern night air, stomping on the gas pedal as he heard sirens behind him.

He wasn’t banned in Oregon yet.

**Author's Note:**

> I've also written a story called "Interstate Blues," which picks up after this story ends, although they're technically independent of each other.


End file.
